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Sightings of the legendary South Island giant cat have been circulating since about the 1990s, everywhere from Canterbury to Marlborough to Southland.
The last one was in Hanmer Springs. At around noon on Sunday, Christchurch osteopath Mark Orr was mountain biking on the Perseverance Bike trail, when he swears he saw it.
“He actually looked like a big black cat, about knee-high … pretty chubby when he turned around and looked at us,” Orr said. Control.
“We were cycling and there was a tree that had fallen on the bike path, so thankfully we had to stop.
“We were putting the bikes on the tree and just when we had one, we saw him, he was kind of walking away and he just turned around and looked at us. And then he kept walking and walked all the way, which you can see in that footage.
“We only moved to New Zealand in January. We’re from Australia, so my first thought was that I didn’t know there were panthers in New Zealand. And I thought it must be something more common.
“Then we started googling and realized it was a little weirder than we thought.
“I texted one of our colleagues who lives here and I said, ‘You have to send that to someone, because what you found is pretty great.”
Orr believes he was about 50 meters away when he saw him, but did not think about pulling out the phone at the time.
When he was about 100 away, his partner was able to get the video footage, he said.
“There is no possibility that it was a dog. None at all … There is nothing in it to tell people that I saw something that I did not see, but it was definitely a big cat, I have no doubt about it. Of all shapes.”
Orr said Control He does not wear glasses and has 20/20 vision.
“He just walked all the way down the road for about a minute and a half, two minutes, he just walked down the road like he owned the place, which was really cool to see actually, once we figured out what What was happening .
“I’m not David Attenborough, I don’t know, but to me he definitely looked like some kind of big cat … the biggest, strongest looking cat I’ve ever seen, so in my eyes, he looked exactly like a panther. “
